Archive | September 11th, 2018

Davao City – Over 200 community volunteers from 11 Kalahi-CIDSS implementing municipalities participated in the recent Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) Leadership Training for Community Volunteers.

Divided into four (4) batches, the training spanned from August to September.

The two-day training aims to enable community volunteers recognize their leadership strengths and weaknesses, explain key leadership concepts and functions, and enumerate crucial skills necessary for an effective leader to guide his followers.

Discussed during the training were Self-Disclosure and Personal Effectiveness, Leadership and Its Basic Concepts, Important Skills of an Effective Leader, and the Importance of Advocating Community Driven Development (CDD) as Local Leaders.

Kalahi-CIDSS municipalities are now on its 3rd cycle of implementation. Local leaders in the community are geared towards advancing Community Driven Development to help push for the institutionalization of the program.

“Our goal is to make our community volunteers as advocates of the program and have them endorse CDD as an effective development strategy. As we hope to present irrefutable, evidence based-gains like CDD adoption, ordinances, and impact of Community Driven-Development (CDD) as basis for approval of the successor program,” stressed DSWD Regional Director Mercedita P. Jabagat.

Advancing community driven development

During the workshop, they were given the chance to come up with actions plans and mechanisms on how to incorporate the CDD process in their barangays.

“The leadership training is pivotal because it will hone not only the leadership skills of our community volunteers, but also to come up with strategies on how to advocate Community Driven Development (CDD). Moreover, it is important to mobilize them to create initiatives, bank experiences of their activities and projects that adopt the CDD process,” said Nick Elvi D. Digol, Deputy Regional Program Manager for Kalahi-CIDSS.

To date, there are 17, 269 trained community volunteers of Kalahi-CIDSS in Davao Region; 45.75% of these are male while 54.25% are female.

On its 3rd cycle of implementation, the 11 municipalities will have a total grant allocation ofPhp 173, 980,750.00.

Kalahi-CIDSS or Kapit-Bisig Laban sa Kahirapan Comprehensive and Integrated Delivery of Social Services is one of the programs of DSWD that uses the CDD approach to empower local communities to undertake their own development projects by actively and directly partaking in local governance in identifying their community needs as well as taking part in implementing projects that will address these needs. (DSWD)